


Missed Connections

by adirtyspoon



Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: F/F, Modern AU, no beta we die like men, oneshot but maybe not, weird breakup but not quite
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-29
Updated: 2020-11-29
Packaged: 2021-03-10 04:49:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,818
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27768568
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/adirtyspoon/pseuds/adirtyspoon
Summary: Catra runs into Adora while working at her cafe, and it drudges up some complicated emotions. Modern AU.Done for a oneshot writing challenge for missed connections - if you guys want me to make an update or turn this to an ongoing series, please LMK!
Relationships: Adora/Catra (She-Ra)
Comments: 6
Kudos: 38





	Missed Connections

Catra had spent the night before working a closing shift at her store and helping decorate the cafe for the winter drink launch, grumbling all the while about how early it was for people to be thinking about Christmas - and for good reason! It wasn’t even Thanksgiving yet! When she’d come in for her mid the next day, it had been brutal and crowded, the first day of the holiday drink season always was. 

She’d done her best all day, she really had. When her boss had put a message out in the groupchat asking all the baristas to put extra effort into connecting with their customers, she’d come to work in that mindset. For nearly all of her shift, she’d welcomed people to the store as they’d walked in, chatted with them as she steamed the milk for their lattes, and thanked them as they’d left with smiles on their faces. But four minutes before she was able to leave for the day,  _ they’d  _ come in. 

Adora’s new rebound friends - some weird couple named Glitter and Boat? She never cared to learn their names, and when she’d called their drinks out today she’d been sure to keep her head low, to say the wrong names in a ploy to keep them from coming up and noticing her. And it worked. 

They had been the first two customers she’d deliberately avoided making a connection with. But then  _ she  _ came in.

Adora. 

By the time she’d gotten Adora’s drink ticket - a toasted white chocolate cold foam cold brew with an extra shot and smoked sea salt topping, some dumb TikTok drink the idiot must have found and been wanting to try, she knew she had to move. She was frantic, trembling through the work as quickly as possible, hoping she could get it out before Adora noticed her.

“Hey, wait a second… Catra?”

Of course that wouldn’t work. She grimaced under her mask, wishing she could vanish into thin air with a puff of smoke instead of queuing shots and pulling cold brew for her one time bestie. She stared down at her now shaking hands, feigning obliviousness as the girl called her name.

“Catra?”

Catra’s heart jackknifed itself in her chest, her breaths left stinging trails in her throat, and hot, shameful tears welled in the corners of her sight.  _ No.  _ She refused to react, even as a furious heat pressed at her cheeks.  _ No _ , she grit her teeth and clenched her eyes shut, pouring the cold foam to top the drink. She wouldn’t let the blonde get a rise out of her, wouldn’t let Adora get to see how she was still wrapped around her finger eight months later. Her hands were shaking too much to put the lid on the drink. She took a deep breath and tried again.

“Catra, is that you?”

Adora’s drink was finished, and she sighed in relief, haphazardly flinging the drink to the handoff counter and calling Adora’s name, making sure to stress the wrong syllable. Maybe she could still keep the blonde from recognizing her, some desperate voice in her head had suggested. 

“I’ve got a drink for Aye-door-uh,” she yelped and wriggled away.

Catra had realized as her phone screen near instantly lit up with a message notification that Adora had seen through her attempt at deception. 

By now it had been hours since then. It was near sunset, and she was still staring at that text she’d gotten minutes after running away from the idiot girl.

_ Are you okay? I miss you. _

What right did she have to ask that anymore? Let alone get an answer. 

The girl took another swig of her drink, poker face gave nothing of the hard burn at the back of her throat away. She eyed the clear plastic at the bottom of her cup wearily, staring with the same exhausted, empty look she’d afforded her ex best friend when they’d ran into each other at the coffeeshop she’d been working at. It was the first time they’d seen one another since they’d fallen out their last semester of community college.

Catra walked back inside from her porch, trading the plastic glass for the whole bottle of rum. She padded back outside, sighing as she slid down the wall, taking a deep swig and listening to the crickets chirping outside. It had all happened so quickly back then she’d hardly even noticed how she’d destroyed their friendship in one night. 

  
  


_ I’m sorry for what happened before, Catra. Please just talk to me again. I miss you. _

Why? She glared at her phone, squinting at the bright text on the screen. The pads of her fingers flicked over the smooth glass as she thought. She took another sip of the alcohol. She sat - alone - on the splintery wood of a second floor back porch in a dingy apartment complex, staring at the vanishing point where scraggly dogshit covered lawns and the soft pinks and purples of the sunset. 

That pink...

It was like hugging Adora in elementary school. Like the way they would run to trees, little six and seven year olds, hand in hand, and dash up the trunks. They’d put stickers all over one another and collapse into each other’s arms with sighs. The last edges of the light were soft, clinging to the far edges of the horizon for every second they had, like she’d always been. Even back then. 

All Catra’s life she’d grown up, trained to think of herself as less. It was the little things - when hers was the second highest test score in the class (Adora’s were almost always first) her knuckles were rapped with wooden spoons until they bled. When she spoke to her dad while he was on the phone, he slapped her. When there was a complaint from school about her behavior, she was left alone in her room for days, until she learned to behave. That stereotypical evil stepmother shit, the kind that there’s never any logical reason for someone normal to latch onto. But Catra had taken the hint young enough - she wasn’t as much of a person as they are.

Fibers made ropes, drops made oceans, and dust made stars. But whatever the thing that made  _ people _ , left them laughing and crying, kissing at gas stations in the countryside - the thing that left them crying at funerals, dancing into the dawn in clubs, reading poetry at open mics… That was something Adora had more of than anyone else, doubly more of than Catra.

So maybe that was part of why Catra had always clung to her. Because holding onto Adora meant that when  _ that stuff  _ radiated off her like thick chords of golden magic Catra was there to take the leftovers, to feel  _ real  _ like everyone else did. Adora had been a lifeline once, but Catra had made the choice to drown now. 

She set the phone down, refusing to text Adora, to cave in and say what she was really feeling.

When they had hit their early teens, before Catra knew what these strange feelings about Adora meant, she’d taken to climbing to her rooftop to watch the sunset. It was nostalgic, and maybe even hopeful at the time. Even then that pink still made her think of Adora. The other day she’d held Adora’s hand in the middle of high school biology, under the desk while a teacher played a movie. And when a red cheeked Adora squirmed away from her, Catra felt like she’d fallen from a building. When the note slid across to her that read  _ do that again  _ she felt like she’d ran back up and jumped off all over again. 

That sunset pink, the night after she held Adora’s hand like that, had left her floating on the clouds until she stepped back onto her roof, that same dusty pink. They’d both just gotten smartphones, and had taken to texting regularly.

_ i miss u _ , she had said to Adora. 

_ its the pink n the sunset _ , she bit her lip, ignoring the weird feeling.

_ I love that we see the same thing so differently. I’ll see you tomorrow. _

Adora never understood. And Catra had been so sure that she would. So ready for Adora to  _ get it _ , to reject her or reciprocate - anything, really. But the only time Adora had any clue about what she wanted was that night back at the end of community college when they’d gotten shitfaced.

It should be said that by then Adora was always the first to pull away when they touched. Adora’s were the fingers that danced away when their tips brushed up against Catra’s. But Catra?

Catra seemed to always want more. On the days they’d hang out and watch TV, knuckles brushing while they sat next to each other on the couch, it was Adora who would pull her hand back to her lap first. And when they hugged, it was always Adora who broke away. And for all Catra’s playfulness, all her flirting, no matter how many times she could pin the blonde down and straddle her hips, no matter the hints, Adora was always clueless, always giving just shy of enough, always leaving Catra hanging. Except when they’d drank.

It had been innocent enough at first, just another end of the semester celebratory sleepover. Catra had braided Adora’s hair (why didn’t she ever do anything other than style it with her signature dumb poof?) and the blonde had insisted they get drunk together, now that they were both twenty-one. 

And the drinking had been fun; but the two of them had been comical lightweights, and it didn’t take long until they were awkwardly dancing around the room, singing their favorite songs and dancing sloppily. They’d always been very physical with one another, and that night they’d been drunk enough dancing turned to play wrestling,that play wrestling turned to cuddling, that cuddling to grinding, and grinding to… well…

They’d fucked, and in the very early pre morning, in the pitch dark, a cried-out and hungover Catra had tiptoed her way out of Adora’s house, and resolved to never speak to the blonde again. She’d ruined their friendship, she could feel it. She hadn’t slept that night, the shame had been so intense. How could she have let herself do that? How could she have shown Adora how badly she wanted her when it was so obvious the blonde only wanted her like that when she wasn’t sober?

An aimless, half reasoned grief had overshadowed Catra since then; Adora and her had been best friends since childhood. Losing her felt like losing a limb, and Catra had written enough overly emotional, half baked poetry to finally make peace with the accuracy of the metaphor. She’d woken up enough times in the night, sure that Adora was right beside her, that the night they’d fucked had turned out any different than it did; sure for the briefest of moments that it had meant anything to Adora other than a drunken hookup. 

Phantom pain was more than just those moments in the night though. It was a syndrome.

The kind where the moment something good happens, she’d rush to text or call Adora, only to remind herself that Adora probably wanted nothing to do with her after what had happened. It was the dull fatigue when she brushed her teeth and felt so exhausted she needed to slip back into bed to recover before being able to shower, the sort of syndrome where the sun’s warmth on cold days reminded her of Adora’s tinkling laugh, when heat waves rising from the pavement made her think of Adora’s hair floating underwater when they’d make silly faces at each other in pools. The gloomy days too, they felt like the world reminding her of what life looked like without Adora - endless drudgery, colorless haze, a slow backslide into meaninglessness.

She couldn’t give up now. Choosing to leave Adora back then had to have been  _ for  _ something. If she let the dumbass back in that would be like admitting she had made a mistake, that  _ she’d _ left someone else because she was so, so terrified of what it would be like to let them all the way in.

The reason Catra had left, underneath it all, was never Adora. It was herself. She was terrified to wake up the morning after and tell Adora the secret that had been behind everything she’d ever done, true as the secret keeping the stars apart. 

She could admit she loved Adora. But she couldn’t admit being in love with her. Not to anyone, not to herself, not after what  _ being in love  _ did to her family, did to her too.

So she found a way to blame it on Adora as well as herself -  _ she just wants me when she’s drunk. I’m just not staying so I can tell her how I feel and let her hurt me. _

Because that was so much easier than  _ She wants me but has been too afraid to show me. Now I know we love each other. It’s time to move forward together. _

Again her phone went off, buzzing under her hand. And kept buzzing. It was a phone call.

Unbelievable.

Catra deaded her phone, rejecting the call, taking a furious swig at the bottle of rum beside her. The wet, splotchy feeling of tears streaming down her face left her trembling with a terrible rage, and she murmured a steady string of curses and insults directed at Adora, and at herself. 

Bitter. That’s what she was. She was bitter she’d never said what she really meant, bitter that Adora would still chase her, bitter that, four years ago, she’d never imagined this was what her life would look like. Moving out, dropping out to get away from her past only for it to walk into her store and as for a cup of joe. 

It was just like Adora to show up and take it all away, take it all in.

Make life feel like a game of pushing two magnets with the poles turned the wrong way together. Catra had given up trying, knew if everything had lined up, the intensity would have been horrifying. And here was Adora, acting like nothing was wrong, nothing about letting Catra back in was scary. 

“Isn’t it obvious I’m just gonna leave you again, stupid?” She asked the breeze, squinting her eyes at the moon. From her angle, knees curled up to her chest as she nestled in the back corner of the porch, the moon seemed to peek through the bars of the metal safety rail. 

That same desperate feeling washed over her, like the walls were closing in, like she really was in a cell, staring up at the moon in a starless, hazy black sky. She wrapped her arms around her head. Regret, regret, regret. If only she could have said what she really meant.

She checked her phone again, mechanical habit.

A voicemail. The idiot really just couldn’t take a hint, could she?

_ ‘Catra, it’s… um, it’s me. I just… I know you don’t wanna hear from me but I just….’  _ she took a sniffly, trembling breath. Catra’s heart, already hammering a dizzying pace, twisted painfully in her chest. 

_ ‘I miss you so much, Catra. It doesn’t have to be like it was before, we don’t have to be good friends or do anything like we used to but I just… Please say something to me, I need you.” _

Catra swiped at her cheeks and eyes furiously, huffing and struggling to maintain composure. Adora had left that eighteen minutes ago. She was going to take some time, think about this calmly, and-

and she was typing a message to Adora now.

_ i’m sorry too,  _ she says. It’s simple enough, true enough. She really is sorry for everything.

_ Catra…  _

_ Please. _

_ Can I talk to you? _

Catra hisses, staring at the screen. Panic, she was feeling panicked. 

_ i’m still not ready, just wait for me. ok adora? _

Was that personable enough? Did she seem like she really cared enough? Did she seem like she cared too much? Was how badly she wanted her still that obvious?

_ As long as you need. I miss you so much. _

Catra texted a quick  _ thank you _ and, once their dialogue was over, blocked the phone number.

It was too much, the way Adora begged for her to come back, how badly she’d missed her. Catra knew better than to think it would be okay this time. Not after how badly she’d ruined it all the morning after.

She set her phone down and took another drink, and a bittersweet smile found itself on her lips. She looked up at the moon, tears streaming down her face, and marvelled at how beautiful it was that Adora could see that same moon, too.

  
  



End file.
